Rage Against the Dying of the Light
by Kaesteranya
Summary: This is my fic dumping ground for shorts I've written for the Suikoden Tierkreis universe. Various characters or pairings, various ratings; will occasionally have spoilers.
1. I'll tap into your strength, Jale

**I'll tap into your strength.**

_The title is taken from the 31 Days theme for September 12, 2009._

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Jale will never admit it, but there are times when he's facing down an army and there's a slight quiver in his hands, a tremor down his spine that makes his mouth go dry and his eyes blur up for just one second before everything's clear, so painfully clear. Bitter thing, this sensation, because it reminds him that he may be a Star of Destiny but Stars like him are very much human. Very much capable of getting scared. Very much capable of fucking up. Very much capable of breaking, limbs and all, and dying.

Thoughts like that could swallow him whole, but Jale is apparently blessed with friends who, as though they had to possess something to compensate for their guilelessness, had impeccable timing. At that moment, reassurance comes in the form of Sieg charging onto the battlefield with a mighty shout, sword ablaze with the power of the Chronicles. They're back-to-back in a moment, in the midst of a circle of enemies.

"You okay, Jale?!"

"Idiot. Of course I am."

Sieg only laughs, laughs like they're not the last two guys standing, not mired eyeball deep in foes. Everything's effortless and easy for someone like Sieg, and Jale used to envy that about him when they were younger and a little more stupid. Nowadays, though, he's nothing but grateful.

"Hey, hey. Let's do the usual, all right? On three!"

"Sure."

"One… two…"

And after they've shouted the last count, Jale turns just a bit and very briefly, in order to burn the image of Sieg's back, haloed against the sunlight, into his eyes.


	2. Stone shadows, Zenoa

**S****tone shadows.**

_This one might be mildly spoilerific, especially if you don't know who Zenoa is._

_The title is taken from the 31 Days theme for June 14, 2006._

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Zenoa sees other names, sometimes, in place of the ones that etched themselves upon the Tablet of Fate's current accidental hero. A trick of the light, maybe – it'd be easy, ridiculously easy, to pass it off as such. She knows, though, that it isn't, because those other names she's seeing, she can still put faces to them, still remembers the way their voices sounded like, the weight of all of those hands.

The names are all that she's left with, the traces of scores of other people from so many other worlds, seared straight across her line of vision. They hover around every corner, with every new one that pops up, dragged in by Sieg's guileless, pure and stupid and well-meaning idiocy. That look she gives each newborn star, it's not quite disdain: it's something closer to her remembering so-and-so _other_ star that once held the title and how he or she met their usually gruesome end, the moment the war was over and their world was quietly swallowed whole. 'Like someone walking over your grave' – quaint way of putting it, really, from another world she dropped in on in between one lost cause and another, but it sort of worked.

She's long since stopped trying to remember who's who, because another name means another layer of death to sift through, and sometimes, it's better to carry on like one did not care rather than remember a name, make a connection, and mistake the living for the dead.


	3. You become responsible, Shams & Taj

**You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.**

_The title is taken from the 31 Days theme for March 4, 2009._

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On most days, Shams does not notice it: the duties of a Crown Prince coupled together with being the Favorite Child and Only Son keep him pretty much fully occupied, aware of little else beyond what is Proper and What Must Be Done. In these moments, Taj is his shadow – the presence at his shoulder, the autonomous blade, the dark wolf walking at his heels. Overall, someone who makes it only too easy to be ignored, someone who has schooled himself in the art of only appearing when he is needed.

It is always and ever a painful study for Shams, then, when he is caught between one duty and the next and finds himself with nothing else to do beyond look up and into Taj's eyes. To stare pure, raw devotion right in the face; to see the weight of love and honor and duty bear down on shoulders as thin as his own. He holds the thread of Taj's life between his two fingers: through a debt of blood, he now commands someone who has forced his way in, declared himself loyal beyond all conventional ideas of loyalty, someone who has decided to exists for the sole purpose of hanging on his every word. He has come to see that for Shams, there is no kingdom, no master: only his Prince, for whom he is willing to die several hundred deaths for.

On demon days and on the rare occasion that it hits him while he sits beneath the pomegranate trees with a sleeping Taj's head pillowed on his lip, Shams wonders if it would be easier, somehow, on the both of them, if he were to take the knife sheathed at Taj's back and slit his retainer's throat himself. "Easy", however, is not for princes. "Easy" is not the word best associated with love.

So he decides, as he always does, to carry the weight of one more life – one somehow infinitely more precious and fragile than all the others – for as long as he has to.


End file.
